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Northwestern University researchers have introduced a soil-microbe-powered fuel cell, significantly outperforming similar technologies and providing a sustainable solution for powering low-energy devices.
How much power does it produce? It must be pretty bad since they don’t mention it anywhere in the article.
They claim “68 times more than required to operate the sensors”, then mention a sensor to measure soil moisture.
A basic soil moisture sensor, like say, the ones I have stacked on a shelf here, will work on 2 AA batteries. It runs on 2V at 10mA. So that’s 20 milliWatts, and in willing to be a fair bit of that goes into the electronics that make a red, green or orange led light up at certain moisture levels, and the bit that beeps when below a certain level.
Still, this sets something of an upper limit at 1.3W, or maybe 680 mA? Those seem rather high, so I’m betting their moisture sensor is a bit more delicate than my model. It depends on the size and number of cells though.
Im pretty sure most soil moisture measurment devices just measure the capacitance to measure dielectric permittivity. U can design such a setup to use any arbitrary amount of power depending how close the electrodes are rogether etc etc.
Yeah, I am imagining the soil moisture things from the garden store, with the little needle gauge thing, that takes so little power that there’s no battery slot. I feel like the amount of power this thing makes is extremely low.
Probably generates nanowatts
The linked article has a table that gives 1.74 uW/cm^2. However glancing over the rest of the paper there’s a ton of variability of output.
I’m thinking around 6
Damn I hoped it would go to eleven, I need that little bit extra.
For low power applications. You won’t be charging your phone off this.
Depends on how many fuel cells you get and are able to shovel dirt into
1.21 gigawatts